Brittney Griner was a WNBA player who represented the team Phoenix Mercury. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist with the U.S. women's national basketball team and a six-time WNBA All-Star. She was additionally named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
On 17 February 2022, she got arrested for drug smuggling in Russia. However, let's go back to the beginning. She was born in 1990. She has three older siblings. She didn't have an easy upbringing. She got bullied because of her height and sexual orientation. Even her father distanced himself from her when she announced that she was a lesbian.
She got drafted to the Phoenix Mercury in 2013. In her debut on 27 May 2013, against Chicago Sky, Griner equaled the WNBA dunk record, recording two dunks to equal Candace Parker's career total. She thus became the third WNBA player to dunk and first to do so twice in one game. She was a dominant defensive force in the league over the season, averaging 3.0 blocks per game. Griner was named a WNBA All-Star but missed the 2013 WNBA All-Star Game with a right knee injury and was replaced by Tina Thompson.
She was poised to join the Olympic team in 2012 but opted out to focus on her studies and other personal reasons. She would go on to play in the Olympic games in Rio De Janeiro (2016) and Tokyo (2020). She won gold medals on both occassions.
During the year of 2020, she called the WNBA to stop playing the U.S. national anthem. This came to protest the killing of Breonna Taylor and as part of the wider George Floyd protests. The wrongful death of George Floyd led to The Black Lives Matter Movement.
Her imprisonment in Russia wasn't the first time she's been behind bars. She was previously charged with domestic violence abuse against her then-fiancee, Glory Johnson. On 22 April 2015, they were both arrested on charges of assault and disorderly conduct after police responded to a fight between the two in their suburban home in Phoenix. Both had sustained some injuries.
Despite this incident, they married the following month on 8 May 2015, in Phoenix. On 15 May 2015, the WNBA suspended Griner and Johnson for seven games each after Griner pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges. Griner was also required to complete 26 weeks of domestic violence counseling. The pair got divorced in June of 2016. Griner became engaged to Cherelle Watson in August 2018 and they got married in June 2019. Watson later changed her name to Cherelle Griner.
It's important to note that Griner wasn't in Russia for sight seeing or a little RNR. She moved there for career and financial reasons. She was playing for the UMMC Ekaterinburg. She was placed to earn more playing in Russia than staying with the WNBA. This is because in Russia, she earned more than $1 million in a season, compared to the $221 450 she earned for the 2021-2022 WNBA season (Grunge, 2022).
This brings up her arrest. She was held up in Sheremetyevo International Airport after the Federal Customs Service found she was carrying vaporiser cartridges containing less than a gram of hash oil. In Arizona, she had been prescribed medicinal cannabis. Cannabis is illegal in Russia.
Some U.S. officials expressed concern that Russia may have been using Griner as leverage in response to the international sanctions imposed against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The former Pentagon official, Evelyn Farkas, expressed concern that Griner could be used as a "high-profile hostage" by Russia. In May 2022, the U.S. State Department stated that they had determined Griner was being "wrongfully detained". On 15 May, it was reported that the United States and Russia would consider a prisoner swap, with Russia exchanging Griner for arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had served 10 years of a 25-year federal prison sentence in the United States.
On 7 July, the second day of her trial, she pleaded guilty to the charges. She reiterated that she had no intentions of breaking the law. On 4 August, the court found Griner guilty and sentenced her to nine years in prison and fined her 1 million rubles (US$16,301), even though the standard sentence for possession of no more than 2 grams of hash oil is 15 days. On 17 November, Griner's lawyers said that she was transferred to IK-2, a female penal colony in the town of Yavas, in the region of Mordovia. She was previously held in an undisclosed location.
Griner's family enlisted the help of Bring Our Families Home to appeal for her release. On 8 December, she was released by Russia in a 1-for-1 prisoner swap for Bout. At the same time as the exchange, Russia deported another American, Sarah Krivanek, who was detained for a domestic violence dispute.
Apart from the obvious, the exchange was good news in terms of a penal colony or exile colony. She would've been exiled from the general population and sent to a remote location if an exchange wasn't done or if she had exhausted all of her appeals. Under this penal colony, she would've to work as a seamtress or wood worker. This all depends on the colony. There was a possibility of cleaning and feeding other prisoners (Grunge, 2022).
Griner recently came out to do an interview about her experiences in Russia. She suffered through her 300 days in custody with mental anguish. It was so bad that she contemplated taking her own life. She said, “I wanted to take my life more than once in those first weeks. I felt like leaving here so badly.”
She additionally said, “I just didn’t think I could get through what I needed to get through. I definitely thought about it. But then, I was just like, ‘What if they didn’t release my body to my family?’ I can’t put them through that. I have to endure this.”
She said that she was ordered to write a letter of apology to Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and ask for forgiveness. She stated, " “They made me write this letter,” not specifying who told her to write the letter. “It was in Russian. I had to basically ask for forgiveness and thanks from their so-called great leader. I didn’t want to do it, but at the same time, I want to come home.”
In addition, she also detailed the living conditions. This included: dirty cells; blood stains on her mattress; no soap and limited toilet paper. Her detainment highlights the inferiority of the WNBA salary caps to that of playing overseas.
Looking at her new surroundings in a Russian penal colony, the enormity of her prison confinement suddenly dawned on Brittney Griner. The 33-year-old Griner said it was at that moment she “felt just less than a human.”
She added, "There was a huge knife sitting on the table, and I was just like: ‘Now, this is going to be a ride. You got to do what you got to do to survive. The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper.” Griner, who the US State Department deemed wrongfully detained, was released last December in a prisoner swap that involved Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
In another interview, she thought that someone would shoot down the plane after her release. When she heard she was being released, she said, "I got a note underneath my door that said, ‘Be ready at midnight,’ or some late, crazy hour. I didn’t even go to sleep. I packed up all my stuff. I slept with my shoes on, and then I finally got to process out. I had put on real clothes, that’s when I knew.”
The 33-year-old said that she was anxious even once she had left her prison facility She added, “We get to that airport, and I get on that plane. I was worried someone might shoot the plane down. It wouldn’t be the first time. I knew I wouldn’t feel safe until wheels are on US soil.”
She stated, “My mind was in some dark places while I was over there, but that love and everyone, like you said, wearing jerseys, tweeting, posters, all that, it made me not feel forgotten, I know that. There were so many nights where I went to sleep and was wondering when the next big story is going to come through and then the hype goes down, all the awareness goes down. But I never felt that drop.”
Earlier this month, Griner and her wife, Cherelle, announced that they are expecting their first child while the 33-year-old is also in contention for a spot on the US team for this year’s Paris Olympics.
To me, this whole situation is crazy. I'd heard of this story before but I didn't know this much about it. After going through it, I must admit that I'm quite spechless. I'm not quite sure what else to say. I suppose it's good news that she's still around. If this story proves anything, it's that family is important. Being provided with love and support can help anyone overcome any obstacles that they may face.
Source Material
Morse, B. 2024. Brittney Griner felt ‘less than human’ while being detained in Russia, she tells ABC in interview. CNN.
Ramsay, G. 2024. Brittney Griner tells The Cut she ‘worried someone might shoot the plane down’ after her release from Russian detention. CNN.
Ramsay, G. & Sterling, W. 2024. Brittney Griner tells ABC that she ‘wanted to take my life more than once’ while detained in Russia. CNN.
Reference List
Grunge (2022). What Nobody Told You About Brittney Griner. 14 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSeV-Mqu9lM (Accessed: 9 May 2024).